thelee

It's complicated enough that you didn't seem to notice (?) that you can have multiple layers of concentration for example. Or that something like the phrase of a chanter can remove ALL layers at once while a simple interrupt only eats up one layer. Stuff like that seems to make things fairly complicated. Then what does prone do? It's described as "more powerful interrupt"... It also doesn't help that, e.g. Resolute says "gain concentration every 6 seconds" but it seems to only refresh the concentration from resolute and won't do anything if you still already have the concentration from resolute.

on JE Sawyer's blog, he makes it sounds like they have all sorts of docs written down about Eora and how everything works; likely this is the sort of stuff that Chris would have been a part of. We only get a fraction of it, and JE Sawyer recently apologized on his blog about one specific confusion because the original cut of Deadfire had an explanation, but they had cut it because at the time they didn't think it was necessary, and all of them had been so immersed in the lore that they thought it was self-evident. So I wouldn't blame a lack of Chris Avellone here because I would gather a lot has already been written down and just not revealed to us in game or in novellas. I would blame some hasty editorial choices at most. So why not patch said content in? To me this sounds like 'the dog ate my homework'. Why would you cut something from a main quest line that already has very sparse dialog? JE Sawyer said that they would try to bring it back in through in-game means (possibly DLC?) https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/174058952291/so-is-the-idea-that-before-the-wheel

Of course not, and I did not claim it is. I claimed that: The problem, of assessing effectiveness, is as simple as observing players behavior as players will, if their number is large and number of trials is large enough, always find the most effective ways to use tools available, which is just obvious. As far as the vocal minority, out of the total number of players who play(ed), who post here. First of all, I have to reiterate the question I've been asking since PoE: What is the point of constant tinkering since only minority will experience it? Secondly, unless we will have some data, which we do not, we can only speculate how others who do not post here play their game. What we know is that players, some of them posting here, figured out very quickly what is effective and what not. Beginning with the person who speedran it in 26 mins to players who posted their Fighter/Monk/Paladin builds and we will likely never hear from them again. Lastly, that some people figured out how, in their own words, to cheese by, for example, abusing PL and poison and withdraw should not, in my opinion, be even considered as a matter requiring attention simply because who would play like that? 0.001% of players? It's not worth the time and energy to bother with. This is a game, not a timeless piece of poetry to be cherished by the future generations. I find this perspective inane. The difference between a decent game, and a great game, is that people didn't stop and say "this is good enough for 50.1% of players out there" but rather tinkered until it was the the very best version of itself that it could be. I honestly don't understand how one could love video games and not want video games to be tinkered with so they could be improved. I wish games long gone/abandoned could be tinkered with and have updated balance patches. Also, for your final quip, video games have only been around for a few decades. It hasn't had time to have the legs that poetry has had. But when we talk about board games... chess, go, chinese chess have had longer legs than entire civilizations, to say nothing about the art that those civilizations produced, and a game like chess has been tinkered with over literally centuries (did you know originally the queen moved identically as the king instead of being the most powerful piece on the board?). I don't think many people still play System Shock or System Shock 2 anymore (and the # of people who played them at the time were so low that Looking Glass Studios had to shutter), but virtually every AAA game that is a first-person-shooter with rpg-y-spellcast-y elements, story told by audio logs and an absent narrator, stealthing, with optionally a hacking component owes itself to SS and SS2 and the care and talent that was put into them, and game designers know this because they were the ones playing SS and SS2 at the time (which is why you see the code 0451 or 451 in so many genre-similar games). So let's not be so disingenuously dismissive of something that has been around for less time than, say, film. Well, I guess I am old school. Back in time, a game was released as more or less a final product. It was either a good game or not. No constant tinkering was possible due to several reasons, mainly technological. I do not believe that constant tinkering makes today's games more fun, or better, than games made decades ago. Speaking of System Schock, which is indeed and in my opinion one of the greatest games ever made. How many updates it got? Video games, unlike chess, are heavily reliant on technology which makes them vulnerable to technological progress. Some games do define genres or introduce groundbreaking stuff and such games will probably go to annals of history to be remembered, not played, by the future generations. Pillars of Eternity is not such game. It is a spiritual successor of such game - Baldur's Gate. How many updates Baldur's Gate got? Who cared about "broken" stuff in Baldur's Gate? What made Baldur's Gate so great? When I asked about the reason for constant tinkering in PoE I was told that its to polish the mechanics for future use. Well, from where I sit I did not work out all that well. System Shock got close to zero updates, and its sequel got like two. It's irrelevant though, because what matters is how much care went into the product to begin with based on a given baseline. Deadfire (or any cRPG) is a vastly more complicated product than SS2, and people's expectations are higher (SS2 is nowhere near balanced and can be trivialized even on impossible difficulty by just investing in an assault rifle, but that was fine for 90s) so things are different now. How many updates did Baldur's Gate (I and II) get? Well, it got several patches at the time, and then it got an Enhanced Edition release, and more patches since then. So actually, quite a bit, and that's almost two decades worth of tinkering (fairly continuous, considering that much of the original enhanced edition stuff was incorporating the baldur's gate unofficial fix pack that fans had been working on fairly continuously since original release). As a lineage though, it also got further tinkering in Icewind Dale, Icewind Dale II, Planescape: Torment, Pillars of Eternity, and now Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire. Much in the same way that chess in the 7th century is not the same as the chess in the 21st century and is really the continuous evolution of a very narrow, specific genre of board game. But frankly, I'm not here to debate with you whether or not games deserve to be considered a serious media, like poetry or chess. I'm here to basically say that if all you're doing is to come into a thread about people who care about making Deadfire the best it could be and your main contribution is "who cares" then you're not really a productive contributor.

on JE Sawyer's blog, he makes it sounds like they have all sorts of docs written down about Eora and how everything works; likely this is the sort of stuff that Chris would have been a part of. We only get a fraction of it, and JE Sawyer recently apologized on his blog about one specific confusion because the original cut of Deadfire had an explanation, but they had cut it because at the time they didn't think it was necessary, and all of them had been so immersed in the lore that they thought it was self-evident. So I wouldn't blame a lack of Chris Avellone here because I would gather a lot has already been written down and just not revealed to us in game or in novellas. I would blame some hasty editorial choices at most.

you can also use escape [rogue or priest] ability to teleport around with it still on. not sure how serious a min-max strat it is, but when i was playing around with a high-deflection riposte build, it meant i was basically immortal but could still ambush enemies without having to worry about toggling a modal. (And i thought there was some brief delay with modal activation; when i activate a weapon modal it feels like it has to wait until my current recovery finishes) still not totally sure how i feel about the acc vs deflection imbalance, at least based on enchantments. deadfire is in many ways a different beast than pillars, despite sharing a lot of similar mechanics. the shield proficiencies are a huge factor in this, which i had not accounted for in my OP (and i really do like the large shield proficiency; i just wish potd was hard enough that i could get a lot more mileage out of it and medium shield proficiency).

Yeah, that's a good point; weapon and shield style no longer has counterbalancing accuracy. It's still a bit "weird" to me, because this is a one-time bonus that surpasses any weapon enchantment at the time, but then steadily becomes outmatched in the late game. I wonder if this is just intended in deadfire; as you go higher level both you and the enemy are just expected to hit/crit more and survival is weighted less on your deflection and more on your armor rating and health pool.

i didn't know that about the beta 1.1 deflection changes. that's good; it actually makes it more meaningful to enchant shields then. i still think it is a bit odd that there's no longer a symmetry between weapon accuracy bonuses and shield deflection bonuses... maybe there are more secondary deflection boosting items than accuracy ones?

I believe that's the case. I was dead worried about my templar of berath and ran some combats in 1.1beta: every time I used flames of devotion + spiritual weapon on a even armored enemy, corrode damage was higher. At character level 6, power level 2, Corrode lash is doing 30% dmg on normal attacks. Multiplicative. Btw, empower spiritual weapon has no effect on item scaling of spiritual weapon. I think it has always been the case that power level only influences the duration of summoned weapons (and summoned creatures), which is sorta lame. (Shorter durations for more powerful weapons would make pwoer level scaling a bit more relevant)

So are these known issues going to be addressed? I just noticed that there's not much discussion of these specific issues in the 1.1 patch notes.

Of course not, and I did not claim it is. I claimed that: The problem, of assessing effectiveness, is as simple as observing players behavior as players will, if their number is large and number of trials is large enough, always find the most effective ways to use tools available, which is just obvious. As far as the vocal minority, out of the total number of players who play(ed), who post here. First of all, I have to reiterate the question I've been asking since PoE: What is the point of constant tinkering since only minority will experience it? Secondly, unless we will have some data, which we do not, we can only speculate how others who do not post here play their game. What we know is that players, some of them posting here, figured out very quickly what is effective and what not. Beginning with the person who speedran it in 26 mins to players who posted their Fighter/Monk/Paladin builds and we will likely never hear from them again. Lastly, that some people figured out how, in their own words, to cheese by, for example, abusing PL and poison and withdraw should not, in my opinion, be even considered as a matter requiring attention simply because who would play like that? 0.001% of players? It's not worth the time and energy to bother with. This is a game, not a timeless piece of poetry to be cherished by the future generations. I find this perspective inane. The difference between a decent game, and a great game, is that people didn't stop and say "this is good enough for 50.1% of players out there" but rather tinkered until it was the the very best version of itself that it could be. I honestly don't understand how one could love video games and not want video games to be tinkered with so they could be improved. I wish games long gone/abandoned could be tinkered with and have updated balance patches. Also, for your final quip, video games have only been around for a few decades. It hasn't had time to have the legs that poetry has had. But when we talk about board games... chess, go, chinese chess have had longer legs than entire civilizations, to say nothing about the art that those civilizations produced, and a game like chess has been tinkered with over literally centuries (did you know originally the queen moved identically as the king instead of being the most powerful piece on the board?). I don't think many people still play System Shock or System Shock 2 anymore (and the # of people who played them at the time were so low that Looking Glass Studios had to shutter), but virtually every AAA game that is a first-person-shooter with rpg-y-spellcast-y elements, story told by audio logs and an absent narrator, stealthing, with optionally a hacking component owes itself to SS and SS2 and the care and talent that was put into them, and game designers know this because they were the ones playing SS and SS2 at the time (which is why you see the code 0451 or 451 in so many genre-similar games). So let's not be so disingenuously dismissive of something that has been around for less time than, say, film.

My thoughts on some questions raised in this thread: 1. Why don't more people care about the gods not being real in Deadfire? Apart from Xoti/Teheru (which I also found a bit incongruous that I could never tell them about the nature of the gods), it just doesn't seem a relevant topic as part of the Deadfire conflict. A gigantic titan is threatening to upend anything, does it really matter if he is a real divine being or something manufactured by an ancient civilization? 2. Why does the Leaden Key need to exist if people don't care? I think that people "not caring" is mostly a temporary phenomenon of there being a gigantic titan crashing through their country. Animancy is still around, and its research still threatens the underpinnings of religious belief and the gods and is the largest present-day threat to the Leaden Key's mission. The Leaden Key is also an arm of Woedica's power, and so even aside from animancy it would still exist to expand Woedica's power. (though, see footnote) 3. On what gods can or can't do Clearly, in the past gods could do a lot (but maybe not at first when they were first getting started re: iovara), but in-game dialogue in poe1 implies that the gods werent happy with their meddling. so it's not that they can't do stuff, it's that they have a gentleman's agreement not to, even as it concerns woedica and thaos. Eothas is a whole other thing, as both times he was seeking to undermine the very foundation of their power, not to mention he breaks the gentleman's agreement first both times (by embodiying waidwen and then by embodying a titan), so all bets go off so as to stop eothas. Footnote/new question: one thing that confuses me is that in poe1 lore, woedica is this absent god (even her in-game book talks about lookin forward to the day when she rules again); in fact in her abscence skaen is her representative at the very end of poe1. Part of Thaos's mission was to restore woedica. Patently, he fails. Unless you also choose to empower woedica in poe1, it is mysterious to me why in deadfire she is suddenly popping up everywhere.

Deadfire does have telemetry data reported back (i think you're prompted to opt-in at the start), and they definitely get some meaningful playstyle data out of it (they were able to tell how/when empower was being used during backer beta), so it is possible (maybe even probable) that they have specific ability usage data as well. Anecdotally, it does not seem like many people are using spiritual weapon, but who knows maybe everyone outside of these forums has been roflstomping the game with a +50% slash lash from xoti's spiritual weapon.

In Deadfire, you get +4/8/12 accuracy for fine/exceptional/superb enchantment. In PoE1, such a scaling made sense because you also got +4/8/12 deflection for fine/exceptional/superb shield enchants. Games like Pillars have always had a relative offense/defense symmetry (recall: a long sword +1 would be somewhat balanced out by someone wearing a leather armor +1). In Deadfire, though, you only get +1/2/3 for fine/exceptional/superb shield enchants. This means offense is heavily favored. Should this be the case, or should accuracy bonuses for enchantments get scaled down? (Lest you think I'm calling for a nerf, keep in mind that enemies also benefit from this; they also get +4/8/12 for fine/exceptional/superb for weapons while your tanks only get +1/2/3 deflection for shields. It would just rebalance things in favor of defense.)

Is it true that there is no holy radiance scaling with disposition? The base amount is 15 healing, but my MC priest gets more than that (removing power level scaling and might bonus, it is closer to a base of ~23), and I have 4 stoic/3 rational as a priest of berath, which seems to imply something like ~2.6666 per disposition if it's capped at 3 per reputation like in poe1 (which is small, but frankly the disposition scaling in poe1 was utterly OP). I feel like I definitely didn't have that extra base healing when I first started out with my priest.

attack animation how long would it take say i have like DEX 20? It should all be in your tool-tip. There's a time for recovery and a time listed for attack.

So in my OP example: it'll start with "sap" then find the nearest target? In such a script, when would "withering strike" ever get used, so long as I have sap?

Example: most built-in scripts have a few basic conditionals and then a long list of abilities, each with carrying "prioritize by". My understanding is that 1. Check conditionals (like "target: in melee range") 2. Use an ability, starting from the top of the list. I don't understand where the "prioritize by" comes into play, especially when different abilities in the list have different priorities. If I have: Conditional: Target: is spellcaster Action: 1. Sap / Prioritize by: nearest 2. Withering Strike / Prioritize by: most damage done If I'm in a fight with two spellcasters, one with 20 armor and at 2m and another with 0 armor at 8m, what will this script do? Relatedly, is "target: is spellcaster" borked? I have aloth set to cast spell reflection buffs under condition 'target: is spellcaster' and he seems to do it in virtually any fight (he just did it in a fight with some beetles).

3s is still way too long for summoned weapons. Even at 0.5s / 0.0s (which is where I've always believed they should be) they would barely be worth it compared to unique weapons that don't require you to spend a precious talent point (and one of two precious casts per encounter of their spell level) to acquire. i think esp for wizard, summoned weapons do enough special stuff that they can warrant a decent cast time - up until i really decked out spellblade-aloth i was still using concelhaut's parasitic staff for self-healing and citzal's lance for group combat into pretty late game. priest summoned weapon is just "do more damage" and depending on whether you're ahead of the scaling curve (which up until superb/legendary--without barely trying in PoTD--I was) and what modals you have, it may not be that much more damage (especially if it's a downgrade to your accuracy). with just a 20% lash the math gets even harder. i might have to do more in game testing, because as it was, je sawyer thought the summoned weapons were pretty good, even lower PL ones (like concelhaut's staff). depending on scaling, maybe an auto-legendary 50% lash weapon might have been too good for a PL2 spell since it's comparable to some of the blander fully upgraded uniques out there (in particular since you can't just puta lash enchantment on any ol' weapon in deadfire). but 20%...

What I never understood was the long cast time. 3 seconds is looooooong. How fast is it, talented? in deadfire, 3s is "fast" (using poe1 terminology). 4.5s is "average" and 6.0s is "slow". and summoned weapons (at least all the ones i can think of) have no recovery, so it is faster than "fast" spell casts (more than 100% faster, in fact). (very fast would be the .5s spell casts) there used to be a time in backer beta where summoning was something like 6-9 seconds. that was long.

say whaaaaaat? they nerfed the lash? at 50% it was only kind of worth the opportunity cost (especially since the relatively slow scaling on summoned weapons means that you could be finding e.g. exceptional weapons and it would only be getting fine-level scaling). first nerf i've heard of so far that sounds confusing to me because i didn't think too many people were using the priest's spiritual weapon much as it was right now. (by contrast, i find the wizard summoning weapons and at least druid/priest's rot skulls to be decent... wonder if they got nerfed.)

I've kind of always had this issue since backer beta. Especially noticeable on my macbook pro, which isn't as pwoerful as my desktop PC. I can play the rest of the game mostly fine (i might have to tune down a setting), but character creation/level up is brutal for my fps.

thanks for the .29 update. any chance that the .23 list will be added on to? there are discussions everywhere about all sorts of balance changes and it'd be good to have some sort of authoritative (even if not comprehensive) list.

AFAICT suppression affliction doesn't tick down the debuff duration; they are merely suspended (and duration frozen) while suppress affliction is on. At least that's how it was in backer beta 4. Thus there is still a good reason to use specific counters over Suppress Affliction, especially for hard CCs like terrified. If this has changed though, I'd be curious to know. Edit: though on pre-1.1 even on POTD some fights can be over fast enough that it doesn't matter that suppress affliction will run out of time.

Yeah, the #1 thing I had to unlearn about Deadfire was that fortitude is not the uberdefense for enemies. It actually seems to follow actual internal stat distributions (whereas in PoE1 even if they did they always seemed to have supernaturally high fortitude). So e.g. priest/wizard types tend to have higher will and low fort, others will have low reflex, and of course the front-line tanks will still have their own high fort. re: Holy Meditation: I mostly see Holy Meditation as a way to get several instances of Concentration or Frightened/Terrified countering, not for the Resolve boost. Resolve is also a bit tricky (deflection is increasing returns) so even at 10s base (up to ~15s with modest intellect investment), +5 deflection can be god-mode in very narrow situations. But yeah, aside from that I think the short duration implies that it is mostly intended as a way to earn a couple Concentration layers or for countering Frightened/Terrified. I mean, that's how I've been using it.

Thing is, it's not about there being no "top-tier" choice, it's about appropriate build diversity (i.e. "no trap builds"). The "no trap builds" design philosophy of pillars is very similar to the approach that Wizards of the Coast takes with their tournament-level Magic: The Gathering banning decisions. They know that banning a particularly powerful card or undermining a deck type is just going to produce a new #1 card or top deck type, but what they care about is making sure that no card or deck strategy is particularly dominant. The reason is two-fold: a. players find it boring when there's only one or limited dominant choices in deck types or cards and b. wizards of the coast sees less revenue when players drop out of playing because the metagame is too boring or static. it's win-win for wizards of the coast to prefer some diversity of cards/decks. So if barbarians are the new #1, that's fine, so long as it's not so the #1 that it renders any party without a barbarian a trap build. I'm reserving full judgment until the ramifications of the patch are fully known, but everything so far sounds like a similar thing; obsidian is knocking down dominant (either too-good or too-prevalent) stuff and is doing only incremental improvements to lift stuff up so as to promote viability/diversity of builds (by them not having been overshadowed by some really good stuff). So Whispers of the Endless Paths gets knocked down a bit, but AFAICT any weapon that comes up to take its place isn't there because it got buffed to be #1, it'll just be a little better relatively speaking, so not-gaming your PoE1 history and not-getting Whispers of the Endless Paths if you do great swords is not going to be a trap decision. I thought I chip in on your comment about trap builds. The elimination of trap builds in your analogy of MTG is valid as MTG games are primarily a PvP format. When there is a direct competitive nature in the game play, balance is always important to encourage diversity. However, for single player CRPGs it is less important as there is no direct motivation for classes to outperform each other that is directly linked to nature of game play. Personally, I play builds that have interesting mechanics and interactions and not necessarily because they are top tiered. Have done so in PoE1, will most likely do so in Deadfire. I think the targeted nerfs of the patch are warranted. What I am apprehensive about is the blanket nerfing of most items. Because it is just not well thought through. Even leading to items that were borderline useless to be nerfed to "why bother" level. Using MTG as an analogy, I think that the latest patch is similar to increasing all summoning and activation costs by 1 colourless mana. When you have some choices that are overtly overperforming than other choices, that is not fun for the people like to play those "other choices." So even in a single-player, non-competitive setting, you have a comparison setting. I felt like this was always a major problem with BG/IWD because by the end-game not having a mage in your party was a major trap choice. You could still beat the game just fine without one, but if you saw just how face-melty other people experienced the game when they had an improved alacrity, time stopping, vomit-inducing-flash-of-colors mage clearing everything (with IWD2 it's different because no time stop or improved alacrity but no less insane with spell focused wail of the banshee), that basically says to players who don't like spellcasting "ha ha screw you your game is much harder." Some quality variation is inevitable, because it's probably impossible to create a non-trivial yet perfectly balanced game (and frankly I'm not sure a perfectly balanced game is even desirable since it is fun when there's a particularly good item or spell or ability that players feel they've earned). But we can at least bound that variation to some small degree (such as by nerfing action speed bonuses across the board, or by having smaller magnitude deflection bonuses compared to PoE1). And it's not just me opining about it, the "no trap choices" philosophy is at the heart of what JE Sawyer was doing with the pillars system (there's a 1 hour GDC talk he gave about it). Again, I'm reserving full judgment about 1.1 because what little I know is mostly people complaining about a nerf which is not exactly a neutral patch changelist, but a "blanket" item nerf, if indeed is the case (such as action speed) seems to me the designers thinking that they were just too good to begin with and something they either wanted to change before release but couldn't before code freeze, or only realized when a larger population than just backer betas started drilling into itemization and ability choices. To go back to an MTG analogy that I think would be more appropriate for this scenario, this would be like how countermagic and card draw has gotten more expensive, because they were just too good to begin with, a fact that everyone resisted/hated at the time of transition because they were used to how things were and how powerful they were was only really apparent to the designers because of their own data and the limited design space the undercosted countermagic and card draw enforced. (I.E. a hard counterspell was UU, but now appears to be more fairly costed at ½UU; a mana-leak type effect was 1U and is now more like 2U; there's a lot more conditional counters; card draw is across the board much more expensive and also more conditional--more "looting" effects or scry rather than pure unconditional card draw).